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Electrically-conducting plastic gets simple and affordable

A team of Australian researchers at the University of New South Wales have discovered a technique that can make almost any plastic film electrically-conductive, and even give some plastics superconducting properties.

Plastics are well known for being lousy conductors, and are used to insulate electric cables, but by placing a thin film of metal onto a sheet of plastic and mixing the metal into the polymer with an ion beam, the researchers can make cheap, strong and flexible plastics, with impressive conducting powers.

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Electricity-conducting plastic isn't necessarily a oxymoron -- conductive polymers do exist. They're just riddled with disadvantages, or only fit for very narrow purposes. You can make plastic conductive by punching and bending a complex metal sheet into the plastic itself, but the process is cumbersome and makes the plastic heavier and inflexible.

There are also specific polymer materials, like polyaniline, polythiophene and polypyrrole, which can conduct electricity, but it can be difficult or impossible to change their shape, they're often unstable conductors, they have low conductivity rates and are intolerant to oxygen exposure and difficult to process.

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This new technique, which has been published in the journal ChemPhysChem by a team led by UNSW's Professor Paul Meredith and Associate Professor Ben Powell, doesn't have those issue. It's easy to produce and still acts like a plastic, but has a high conductivity on par with metals.

"This material is so interesting because we can take all the desirable aspects of polymers -- such as mechanical flexibility, robustness and low cost -- and into the mix add good electrical conductivity," said Professor Adam Micolich, who contributed to the research.

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The most exciting part, says researcher Dr Andrew Stephenson, is the way that material scientists can precisely alter the materials' conductivity. "Put simply, we have ten billion options to adjust the recipe when we're making the plastic film. In theory, we can make plastics that conduct no electricity at all or as well as metals do -- and everything in between."

By making an affordable and approachable technique for producing conductive plastics, we could see flexible touchscreens and that oh-so-futuristic e-paper sooner than you might think.